An op-ed published in the New York Times on April 1 extolls the unsung virtues of natural history collections.

“Natural history museums are so focused on the future that they have for centuries routinely preserved such specimens to answer questions they didn’t yet know how to ask, requiring methodologies that had not yet been invented, to make discoveries that would have been, for the original collectors, inconceivable,” wrote Richard Conniff, author of the column.